Undoubtedly, the age of big data has opened new options for natural disaster management, primarily because of the varied possibilities it provides in visualizing, analyzing, and predicting natural disasters. From this perspective, big data has radically changed the ways through which human societies adopt natural disaster management strategies to reduce human suffering and economic losses. In a world that is now heavily dependent on information technology, the prime objective of computer experts and policy makers is to make the best of big data by sourcing information from varied formats and storing it in ways that it can be effectively used during different stages of natural disaster management. This paper aimed at making a systematic review of the literature in analyzing the role of big data in natural disaster management and highlighting the present status of the technology in providing meaningful and effective solutions in natural disaster management. The paper has presented the findings of several researchers on varied scientific and technological perspectives that have a bearing on the efficacy of big data in facilitating natural disaster management. In this context, this paper reviews the major big data sources, the associated achievements in different disaster management phases, and emerging technological topics associated with leveraging this new ecosystem of Big Data to monitor and detect natural hazards, mitigate their effects, assist in relief efforts, and contribute to the recovery and reconstruction processes.

The sudden outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) swept across the world in early 2020, triggering the lockdowns of several billion people across many countries, including China, Spain, India, the U.K., Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Russia, and the U.S. The transmission of the virus accelerated rapidly with the most confirmed cases in the U.S., India, Russia, and Brazil. In response to this national and global emergency, the NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center brought together a taskforce of international researchers and assembled implementation strategies to rapidly respond to this crisis, for supporting research, saving lives, and protecting the health of global citizens. This perspective paper presents our collective view on the global health emergency and our effort in collecting, analyzing, and sharing relevant data on global policy and government responses, human mobility, environmental impact, socioeconomical impact; in developing research capabilities and mitigation measures with global scientists, promoting collaborative research on outbreak dynamics, and reflecting on the dynamic responses from human societies.

Social media platforms have been contributing to disaster management during the past several years. Text mining solutions using traditional machine learning techniques have been developed to categorize the messages into different themes, such as caution and advice, to better understand the meaning and leverage useful information from the social media text content. However, these methods are mostly event specific and difficult to generalize for cross-event classifications. In other words, traditional classification models trained by historic datasets are not capable of categorizing social media messages from a future event. This research examines the capability of a convolutional neural network (CNN) model in cross-event Twitter topic classification based on three geo-tagged twitter datasets collected during Hurricanes Sandy, Harvey, and Irma. The performance of the CNN model is compared to two traditional machine learning methods: support vector machine (SVM) and logistic regression (LR). Experiment results showed that CNN models achieved a consistently better accuracy for both single event and cross-event evaluation scenarios whereas SVM and LR models had lower accuracy compared to their own single event accuracy results. This indicated that the CNN model has the capability of pre-training Twitter data from past events to classify for an upcoming event for situational awareness.

The rising temperature is one of the key indicators of a warming climate, capable of causing extensive stress to biological systems as well as built structures.Ambient temperature collected at ground level can have higher variability than regional weather forecasts, which fail to capture local dynamics. There remains a clear need for accurate air temperature prediction at the suburban scale at high temporal and spatial resolutions. This research proposed a framework based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) deep learning network to generate day-ahead hourly temperature forecasts with high spatial resolution. Air temperature observations are collected at a very fine scale (~150m) along major roads of New York City (NYC) through the Internet of Things (IoT) data for 2019-2020. The network is a stacked two layer LSTM network, which is able to process the measurements from all sensor locations at the same time and is able to produce predictions for multiple future time steps simultaneously. Experiments showed that the LSTM network outperformed other traditional time series forecasting techniques, such as the persistence model, historical average, AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), and feedforward neural networks (FNN). In addition, historical weather observations are collected from in situ weather sensors (i.e., Weather Underground, WU) within the region for the past five years. Experiments were conducted to compare the performance of the LSTM network with different training datasets: 1) IoT data alone, or 2) IoT data with the historical five years of WU data. By leveraging the historical air temperature from WU, the LSTM model achieved a generally increased accuracy by being exposed to more historical patterns that might not be present in the IoT observations. Meanwhile, by using IoT observations, the spatial resolution of air temperature predictions is significantly improved.